Exec sees CryEngine 3 as competitive with Epic's latest.

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Crytek CEO and founder Cevat Yerli has a lot to be proud of. In just over a decade, his company has gone from a personal hobby to a major player in the game industry. Not only have its first-person franchises like Far Cry and Crysis become synonymous with top-of-the-line graphics, but its CryEngine 3 is being licensed for major upcoming projects including MechWarrior Online and the next game from Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock. The company is also investing heavily in the growing free-to-play first-person shooter market with Warface.

But Crytek faces significant challenges as well. While CryEngine 3 continues to be licensed by high-profile games, architectural firms and even the United States Army, the Unreal Engine has much deeper penetration in the video game space and drew considerable attention with the recent reveal of Unreal Engine 4. And while Warface is successful abroad, it is untested in the North American market.

Yet when I talked to Yerli at E3, he came across as one of the most relaxed people at the entire show. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, but he wore a consistent smile, laughed readily, and didn't seem at all like someone facing down threats from all sides.

I spoke with Yerli about the origins of Crytek, the future of CryEngine in an “Unreal” world, and why high-end PC gamers can be a tough audience to target.

Ars Technica: You began developing CryEngine as a college student. Was that your first experience in game development?

Cevat Yerli: I was 12 years old when I made my first game, [but] Crytek was formed in '99. It was a virtual company. It was a hobby for me more than anything else, really. I had friends all over the world, on the Internet, that shared my opinions and my thoughts, and they were happy with what I said and they joined the virtual teams. This was all for a hobby only, to make the kind of games we would love to make. I was 16 when I started my first endeavors to make games [with others], and I was 19 when the more serious efforts started.

Then in 1999, when I was 21, we had three different prototypes we had developed. One was called X-Isle, one was Silent Space, it was a space shooter, and the other one was called Engalus. And in 2000 I went to E3 and showed those three prototypes around, and people were blown away by the quality because we were doing this as a hobby. And when people said, “How come your hobby project is better than our pro project that we're showing at E3?” I was like, “I have no answer for that, but I know what we do is cool.”

We [Yerli and his brothers Avni and Faruk] were three Germans coming from Germany with [our] suits [on], and nobody was wearing suits here. I was like, “Alright, get rid of the suits!” the next day. We showed some of the stuff to publishers, and Ubisoft was the one that picked up X-Isle, which then became Far Cry.

When you were pulling together your original team to work on X-Isle, how did you sell them on the idea of designing an entire engine? That’s a huge project for a bunch of guys just as a hobby.

It was kind of like a chicken/egg issue. First we're like, “Okay, we want to build this game,” and we didn't want to compromise the idea. We didn't know what it meant to make this game, because we looked at the other [game] engines and said, “This engine cannot do the game we want to do.” We found that, back then, Unreal, or its software engine, was too “closed-spaces.” We wanted to have a terrain-based, open world engine for Far Cry, and that technology didn't exist. So we said, “Let's build it.”

And people didn’t really question the statement “Let's build it.” They just said, “Alright, so who do we need to hire?” And then I started hand-picking engineers and the tools guy and whatnot. Effectively, as we were building the company, as we were learning how to make games, we also built an engine team at the same time.

The odds of failure are huge at that point, but we had no fear and we had no understanding of the risk. We just did it. We didn't have the burden of previous experiences, so we could be mad enough to do it. If I would [build a new company] with today's experience, probably I wouldn't be that crazy.

If you think [about] our risk profile, there's three guys who want to make a game, so they pick the genre of shooters, which is most difficult at that time. They decide to make their own engine and a whole different game that had never been done before. Bright colors, open spaces, nonlinear, systemic AI, things like that, and [our] first engine, so the odds of failure [were] huge.

Where does the “Cry” in Crytek come from? Crytek, CryEngine...

I'm poor at coming up with names, that's why! [laughs]

It came from somewhere.

I wanted to have recognition around the Crytek brand. The conception of the Crytek name, the real reason is a secret, but I'll tell you another reason. It's the technology that should eventually be so emotionally true that it makes you cry, right? Then there's another reason, which is the original reason, which one day I will share, but not now. The idea is that we want to be sure there's a brand recognition with our games that we build, but we are relaxing this a little bit right now.

When you look around in the video game industry, do you see advances in technology that you think are clear responses to CryEngine?

Oh, yeah. A lot of them. A lotof them. I mean, if you honestly look back at the last six years, since 2007... when we put the first Sandbox video out, the CryEngine 2 editor where you could play the game inside the editor, nobody had done that before. So we see the Unity [engine] spawn off... and the Epic [Unreal] engine tried to mimic that, and Epic is still not there 100%, but Unity actually started like that, clearly inspired by Sandbox.

If I look at DirectX 9, DX10, DX11, progress is being put out constantly, every time there was a following wave, and if you really analyze [the] technical quality of the engine since [the] X-Isle tech demo, then Far Cry, then Crysis, then Crysis 2, I don't think there was ever a moment when CryEngine did not lead the pack. And I think it's because we are relentless in that regard.

We do not think of it as, “Do we really need the future?” We rather say, “Make it.” It's better for the gamer, it's cooler for the game. We don't [worry] over a ton of investment. We just go forward and say, “That's the best thing we can do, that's going to press the boundaries, that's going to innovate, that's going to allow this,” and we want the best to achieve that.

Our culture, our philosophy in our company, [is that] we let the guys come up with the new ideas. It's not very top-down and I say to [my] engineers, “Hey guys, can you do this and this for me?” Rather, [I say], “How do you think we can push the graphics forward? What can an animation do? What can physics do?” And those guys come up with tons of ideas which they pitch, and [I] say, “Go and do it.”

I don't ask them, “Did you check with [the] game team if they need it?” [I say], “Make a case, tell the game team how they can benefit from it.” That's how you get evolution. If you ask your customer, as in gamers, sometimes they don't know what they want yet, because if they can't imagine the future, it's difficult. So the best subject matter experts are the people who do the job, and if you tell them, “Where do you see the next two years going,” they come up with hundreds of ideas.

I'm just packaging them and saying, “Let's take this, this, and this” and then we go forward, and then tell the game team to use it. And that's how the best games are done.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl

34 Reader Comments

He didn't answer the question about whether or not graphics quality will ever hit a wall. He just talked about what he did with CryEngine. Which is cool, but he didn't answer the question. And the answer is no, because not every game company has the need for bleeding edge visuals, or the money. And some companies just like their games to have a unique look that you can't always pull off with a licensed engine.

Hardcore gamers haven't embraced free to play games because there aren't any truly competitive F2P games. There are a lot of F2P games with competition in them, but there is usually enough pay to win in them that it skews the results in favor of people who can afford to throw money at their game.

He's right though, about retailers being able to influence and prevent change in the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, he didn't give his opinion on the next-gen consoles and their impact on future game design. that would probably have been the best question to ask.

Yerli's confidence does not surprise me. I played around modding and mapping the first FarCry shortly after release. In a single evening I was able to produce, playtest & improve offroad/racetrack maps with my brother. No more than 1-2 hours effort and a lot of multiplayer fun.

Compare this pipeline to doing anything within the Unreal Engine. It's a monster. It's great to have thousands of bells and whistles but they are obscure and buried. No newbie can create anything of note within an hour or two.

With the CryEngine Sandbox I was able to produce, test and tweak something playable in an evening from scratch (being a total newb at modding). The Unreal Engine just makes me want to cry, it's not beginner friendly, easy to use or quick to produce anything. Epic is the effort involved to do anything with it.

Hardcore gamers haven't embraced free to play games because there aren't any truly competitive F2P games. There are a lot of F2P games with competition in them, but there is usually enough pay to win in them that it skews the results in favor of people who can afford to throw money at their game.

I'm sure Tribes Ascend would make you take that comment back. Seriously having more fun with that game -- at the moment that I've shelved games that I HAVE paid for and haven't played yet.

The game is so heavily skill/strategy oriented that a skillful noob/non-payer can compete. Not to mention that all content in the game can be "purchased" with in game experience earned by playing (as well as with "gold" purchased with real money). Anyway, off topic enough, but it's fun so I had to speak up ;- )

The free to play thing might have something to do with the population of console vs PC gamers in different countries. From my experience, India is very PC gaming focused and I imagine much of Asia is similar in preferring the PC. In Europe and NA, consoles tend to be more popular (with the possible exception of Germany), and deploying a F2P game on a console isn't exactly feasible.

Hardcore gamers haven't embraced free to play games because there aren't any truly competitive F2P games. There are a lot of F2P games with competition in them, but there is usually enough pay to win in them that it skews the results in favor of people who can afford to throw money at their game.

I'm sure Tribes Ascend would make you take that comment back. Seriously having more fun with that game -- at the moment that I've shelved games that I HAVE paid for and haven't played yet.

The game is so heavily skill/strategy oriented that a skillful noob/non-payer can compete. Not to mention that all content in the game can be "purchased" with in game experience earned by playing (as well as with "gold" purchased with real money). Anyway, off topic enough, but it's fun so I had to speak up ;- )

++

Not to thread highjack here--My friends keep wondering why I'm not playing Diablo 3 more, and it's thanks to Tribes Ascend. I've watched a few competitive matches... wow those guys are good, way way way beyond my level, but the game has enough diversity that scrubs like me can still find a way to contribute, even if I can't break 275 with a pathfinder :-/

Anyway, this Crytek Guy sounds like so many other people I've heard interviewed who start out on top (accidentally or otherwise), and then don't even realize how quickly the competition has caught up or even surpassed them (not knowing that UE4 can do real-time lighting changes was pretty surprising)

If his engine is so much better than everyone elses, why didn't everyone use it like UE3?

Yerli's confidence does not surprise me. I played around modding and mapping the first FarCry shortly after release. In a single evening I was able to produce, playtest & improve offroad/racetrack maps with my brother. No more than 1-2 hours effort and a lot of multiplayer fun.

Compare this pipeline to doing anything within the Unreal Engine. It's a monster. It's great to have thousands of bells and whistles but they are obscure and buried. No newbie can create anything of note within an hour or two.

With the CryEngine Sandbox I was able to produce, test and tweak something playable in an evening from scratch (being a total newb at modding). The Unreal Engine just makes me want to cry, it's not beginner friendly, easy to use or quick to produce anything. Epic is the effort involved to do anything with it.

CryTek have nothing to fear from the establishment engine of choice.

I haven't played with either engine (I work with non-realtime 3D), but ease-of-use isn't the only desirable quality. 3DStudio or Maya aren't easy programs to use and extremely difficult to master, compared to many other software packages, but the tools they offer are extremely capable.

It's possible that a game engine could be easy for a new user to create something cool in, but very hard for the professional to create exactly what he wants, since he'll need much more low-level tools.

Again, I have used neither engine, so it's possible CryEngine simply has a better user interface.

(not knowing that UE4 can do real-time lighting changes was pretty surprising)

I didn't take from it that he didn't know UE4 can do RT lighting. It sounds like he's talking about how CryEngine has been doing realtime lighting for 2-3 years, while UE can't - and UE4 has only just been unveiled, and probably isn't even ready for licensing yet. (At least it says UE3 everywhere on their licensing page).

I think he's pretty aware of the competition - he sounds like a real geek, so I assume he'd follow all developements in the market with great interest.

Hardcore gamers haven't embraced free to play games because there aren't any truly competitive F2P games. There are a lot of F2P games with competition in them, but there is usually enough pay to win in them that it skews the results in favor of people who can afford to throw money at their game.

TF2? There's a pretty big competitive scene and every weapon is easy to obtain freely not to mention they're almost all side-grades. My load-out for most classes is extremely close to the stock load-out despite the fact that I have or have had almost every weapon in the game at some point. Most anything that gets purchased in TF2 is purely cosmetic (keys, nametags, paint, hats, miscs, keys for use as currency to obtain stranges, etc.)

when we put the first Sandbox video out, the CryEngine 2 editor where you could play the game inside the editor, nobody had done that before

If by 'nobody' he means Blender, which has had the ability since its inception. I know there were other game engine/game editors that could do that too. Unity was probably more in response to Blenders ability than to Crytek.

Hardcore gamers haven't embraced free to play games because there aren't any truly competitive F2P games. There are a lot of F2P games with competition in them, but there is usually enough pay to win in them that it skews the results in favor of people who can afford to throw money at their game.

I'm sure Tribes Ascend would make you take that comment back. Seriously having more fun with that game -- at the moment that I've shelved games that I HAVE paid for and haven't played yet.

The game is so heavily skill/strategy oriented that a skillful noob/non-payer can compete. Not to mention that all content in the game can be "purchased" with in game experience earned by playing (as well as with "gold" purchased with real money). Anyway, off topic enough, but it's fun so I had to speak up ;- )

I heard about Tribes Ascend recently (good things), thought about buying it and it kind of confused me when it turned out to be totally free. Great game, no cost, what's the catch? kind of thing. Installed it, started playing and realised that I could likely dump some money into it. I've been heavily in D3 and wouldn't mind playing both but I have massive time constraints on that. I wouldn't mind being competitive via putting a small amount of actual money in (and since it was free, that's easy to justify).

Oh, yeah. A lot of them. A lot of them. I mean, if you honestly look back at the last six years, since 2007... when we put the first Sandbox video out, the CryEngine 2 editor where you could play the game inside the editor, nobody had done that before.

Worth noting that the open source 3D game engine Cube 2 (Sauerbraten) has had an editor in the game (or game in the editor, however you want to call it) since 2005 or so. Pressing 'e' pops you into and out of full edit mode from the game, and the game can keep running when in the editor. It even works in multiplayer mode, several people can play and edit the same level at once over the network.

But CryEngine has definitely been leading in the commercial space in that respect.

I think he's just putting up a front. UDK 4 probably has him pressured. I doubt he'll get a NA audience to do pay-to-win gaming for awhile yet. To me personally it's nasty, it looks like bribery. It's something I won't get in to.

On another note, hearing how he started off as a hobbyist reminded me that I need to find a group of people making mods/games as a hobby to run with...if anyone knows of any groups/teams that'll accept people who'll be pretty-useless for awhile (recoup from a long term back injury + learning curve), let me know? (e-mail: myArsUsername@Gmail.com)

Figuring out any of these tools by oneself is absolutely horrible. I learned Blender 3D 2.49 and then 2.5 BEFORE there was documentation for the new interface, am self-teaching Photoshop and occasionally poking Maya with a very long pole (it still bites me), and the UDK still confuses me. Worse yet, I'm still not great with the ones I figured out.

I wonder if/when one of these companies is going to go "You know, we have it pretty much running the game in here, but we don't have online matchmaking. This could really make it easier for people to team up and figure out what they're doing."

Ugh, F2P experiences never feel complete, and that's my major qualm with them. It's the same reason I cannot play games like MMOs: they have no definitive end to them. All of my media ALL OF IT should be viewed as a feast, I spend time with it, I eat more things than others, but after a couple of days the meal gets stale and you throw it out, and wait until you get hungry again for something else.

Subscription based services require constant attention to get your $s worth that I'm not willing to devote to. F2P is like a puzzle that can never be truly completed trying to encourage you to buy that last new piece.

The bottom line is that they both try and tap into your dopamine levels in your brain so that you NEED the next iteration of the same the same title that you have been playing for a long time. The only saving grace for F2P is that if you work at it most games let you get by without paying a dollar.

Yerli's confidence does not surprise me. I played around modding and mapping the first FarCry shortly after release. In a single evening I was able to produce, playtest & improve offroad/racetrack maps with my brother. No more than 1-2 hours effort and a lot of multiplayer fun.

Compare this pipeline to doing anything within the Unreal Engine. It's a monster. It's great to have thousands of bells and whistles but they are obscure and buried. No newbie can create anything of note within an hour or two.

With the CryEngine Sandbox I was able to produce, test and tweak something playable in an evening from scratch (being a total newb at modding). The Unreal Engine just makes me want to cry, it's not beginner friendly, easy to use or quick to produce anything. Epic is the effort involved to do anything with it.

CryTek have nothing to fear from the establishment engine of choice.

this may be true, but seems to me they had more of a problem marketing this engine than usability. feature wise we can already assume they were lacking, since even if it was expensive to license, at least some people would use it if it was technically superior. we've heard nothing but crickets for anything till cryengine3 and mechwarrior.

meanwhile, epic has been offering ue2/3 free of charge for any startups until they generate x amount of profit, this has to be a major factor for devs that for some reason chose to learn and use one over the other. so far all I remember seeing for older cryengines are non profit and mod based projects with no real commercial value, they look pretty and all sorts of features are being showcased here but where are all the games?

EA is another problem altogether, that will also be holding them back from any real success until this code gets put to good use elsewhere.

I'm disappointed that the interviewer didn't follow up about UE4 - that should have been the heart of the interview right there.

1. Why is your engine more or less ignored by the market while everyone else rushed to use UE3?

2. Why do you think UE4 got so much attention from press if your engine can already do all these things and more? Is this a marketing failure on your part or is there some other hitch?

Yerli makes it pretty clear why CryEngine has less market penetration - Crytek doesn't offer discounts and isn't going for wide use. It's not a marketing failure or a hitch according to Yerli - it's a choice. Whereas Epic made specific note of their competitive Unreal Engine 3 licensing deal structure and trumpeted the ability of the engine to run on mobile devices and in browser windows during their GDC presentation this year. They *are* going for deep market penetration!

Unreal Engine 4 has received a lot of attention from the press recently because they just began announcing it widely this year. Crysis 2 and CryEngine 3 were news *last* year. Perhaps had Crytek been making some announcements about CryEngine advances this year which weren't picked up on by the press your question would be valid, but as it stands of course UE4 got so much attention from the press. I bet if we look back at when CryEngine 3 was first hitting the market it got a lot of attention, too, right?

Sometimes I feel like the only person who reads "cloud" and nearly vomits. I have very little interest in online game features. I play my games offline unless I specifically feel like being social with my friends.

As I read this interview I recalled back to how nice looking Crysis was. With Crysis they really pushed the envelope of the visual experience. They did things on a PC nobody thought possible. Then with Crysis 2 they put all their effort into making the game run well on console systems and neglected to push the envelop for PC. To be fair the second game did look as good as the first. But I had been hoping for another giant leap in visual fidelity and when that didn't come I couldn't help but be disappointed.

Now read Cevat talking about "Cloud" and I feel even more disappointed than I did with Crysis 2. Who gives a rats-ass about the cloud Cevat?! Re-focus your efforts on something gamers actually appreciate. Did you see Bethesda chattering up the cloud with Skyrim? No! Work on what matters to gamers. Visual fidelity, audio fidelity, advanced physics, game mod-ability, and experience. I actually WANT to have to upgrade my machine to play your games and you've forgotten that.

Funny thing, Yerli can remain as unimpressed by Unreal 4 as he wants but that still doesn't change the fact that a bunch of the games I have liked over the years have ran on the first Unreal up to the current. Number of CryEngine games to fall into the same category? Maybe one. Sure CryEngine 3 can also be impressive but considering Crysis 2 lacked DX11 support on launch I'm not sure why it's important, both engines catered to consoles first.

Also comparing Unity to CryEngine seems awkward. Sure it has an in editor play button. Wow. Amazing right? Totally influenced by CryEngine! Except it's more geared towards indies and it runs on Macs (not a huge bonus). Sandbox I played around with...Unreal about the same, Unity I was able to figure out how to use quickly. Maybe his engine inspired everyone but that's like saying Everquest is awesomer because it's what inspired WoW. I still bet WoW is better known and makes more money.

Not to call it crap though, do what you love and all. T

Infinity4011 wrote:

Hardcore gamers haven't embraced free to play games because there aren't any truly competitive F2P games. There are a lot of F2P games with competition in them, but there is usually enough pay to win in them that it skews the results in favor of people who can afford to throw money at their game.

Tribes lacks that and has been adopted for competitions, even before it was "released" though there are indeed many others that simply are P2W. Tribes really isn't since you can earn anything even if slowly.

This is just one example:- that is 'truly' competitive F2P game- it does not allow real 'pay-to-win', since main 'pay' benefit (faster leveling) does not give you any advantage in actual game due to you always fighting your peer levels- it is already present on EU and US markets, and it started on RU market (regarding Yerli's statement about being 1st in west with eastern F2P approach)

Also there are many other successful, 'triple-A' , 'truly competitive' F2P games. And even more games that are not exactly F2P, but also revolve around in-game transactions model (which appears to be future for most games).

He's still a douchebag that doesn't understand shit about the industry, and that blamed low sales (he considered 1 million units sold of a pretty but fucking boring game LOW SALES) of a game that could only be moved by 2-3% of machines at the time on piracy, saying it would have sold 20 times more it it wasn't for it (yeah, 20 mill, sure).

Ugh, F2P experiences never feel complete, and that's my major qualm with them. It's the same reason I cannot play games like MMOs: they have no definitive end to them. All of my media ALL OF IT should be viewed as a feast, I spend time with it, I eat more things than others, but after a couple of days the meal gets stale and you throw it out, and wait until you get hungry again for something else.

Subscription based services require constant attention to get your $s worth that I'm not willing to devote to. F2P is like a puzzle that can never be truly completed trying to encourage you to buy that last new piece.

The bottom line is that they both try and tap into your dopamine levels in your brain so that you NEED the next iteration of the same the same title that you have been playing for a long time. The only saving grace for F2P is that if you work at it most games let you get by without paying a dollar.

I agree with what you say about incomplete experiences, but for me I like them because they don't require a time investment to fully enjoy. I can jump in to TF2, play for 10-20 minutes and get what I wanted out of it. Trying to do that with a story driven game gets frustrating. Doing it with a checkpoint driven game (or fixed save points) is even more frustrating since you'd obviously be replaying large portions of the game over and over again.

Also, with the good F2P games, you never really feel like you have to spend money. In TF2 you'd never get that feeling unless, for some reason, you felt the game would be unplayable if your engie isn't sporting a graceful blond mullet and your spy isn't wearing an illustrious George Washington wig.

Hmm... the 'cloud' comment makes me skeptical too. But if one thinks about it from the confines of strictly an engine, it actually could be interesting. Say you had a render farm in the cloud you connect to with your game. There have to be plenty of static stuff and AI it could handle rendering / calculation of that isn't hugely latency dependent. Not on-live style or anything, (I'm still meh on latency for that), but something the PC can wait 100ms for without causing a degraded experience. I'm very curious how much you could split from being required to calculate <100ms on a local system and what could be done in the cloud.

A whole interview with him bragging about pushing the envelope on graphics and so on, and not a single question on how come Crysis 2 was visually crap.

On the PC, after the big patch, it was not crap. It was the best looking game of 2011 (and 2012). Yerli might sound sore-loserish, but he telling the truth about his engine. It's been the far superior engine in the market for a while now. Unreal is just now catching up with features like real time lighting.

Someone else asked about this....and the answer is that better tech doesn't always win. Look back in history to see VHS beat Betamax. The market for shooter engines probably hinges on cost and support, and Epic just has the more established track record, and they have so much volume that they can easily reflect it in there pricing. That's why they win the engine war...no because they are the better engine.

This is a piece of history; Far Cry may have been the last FPS i actually attempted to play I was so bored by the mindless shooting i haven't attempted another one ever since.Well, except Serious Sam 3, who makes no excuses about the mindless shooting.That might explain your "lost sales"?

For those asking why CryEngine wasn't used for more games, the answer is pretty simple. CryEngine was pc only until version 3 (i.e. Crysis 2) nearly 4 years after the debut of the current generation of consoles. Meanwhile Unreal Engine 3 had been available on consoles from pretty much day 1, giving developers a stable toolset to work with and consumers years of shiny modelling clay graphics

At this point the current generation is pretty much ruled by unreal. The graphics are "good enough" and there really isn't a compelling reason to retrain a dev team to use CryEngine. Maybe in the next generation, CryTek may start to make inroads, but it's unlikely. The only way I can really see it happening is if EA decide they'd rather see all their games made with cryengine (more profit for them).